Introduction

This document serves as a summary of quite a few resources on writing a resume. I have added in components specific to your goals as budding data scientists. The topics we will cover are:

  1. Format and Media
  2. Resume Content / Outline


Resume Format and Media

Did you know? HR managers spend on average less than six seconds looking at your resume.

The formatting and layout of your resume answers the most important question of all: should I keep looking at this resume?

How you display your resume sends a message. Should you write a website-based resume, a YouTube video, a billboard, an ad in a magazine or newspaper, an Amazon product page, or a plain old PDF/Word document?

We will watch this video from the Purdue OWL (from 0’20" to 2’45“).

Visual

There are many styles of resumes to choose from, but be consistent with the one you pick. Changing colours, arrangement, or fonts throughout the document distract the reader from the message you are trying to send.

Whatever you do, don’t let the page get too “busy”. Always zoom out to 50% zoom (or something similar) to look at the “big picture” of the page. You want the resume to look clean and easy to read.

Here are some tips:

Colour

Pick one (two at most) colour(s) to draw attention to important details of your resume, or to draw attention to the resume itself.

See these examples. (I don’t recommend many of these layouts, but the use of colour can be beneficial.)

Arrangement

As with colour, the arrangement of the helps to highlight the most important aspects of your resume. As we saw in the above link, people can be very creative with their resume layout and arrangement! However, I would err on the side of caution: you are scientists, not artists or marketing managers.

Here is a nice resume template for a professional applicant:

This is a very create resume for an artist:

Notice that the arrangement and the layout of the material tell the story of who the applicant is, long before we ever read the words. As scientists, a clean and logically-arranged resume will give the message that you are attentive to detail, and that you prize logic and order.

White Space

To aid in the “clean and logical” goal, don’t be afraid of whitespace! Blank space should seperate sections like periods should separate sentences and spaces separate words. We. don’t. write. like. this. Andwedon’twritelikethiseither. Use whitespace to help tell your story.

Examples

Font

The font choice doesn’t win you much when you choose correctly, but it can be disastrous for you should you choose incorrectly. You want to choose a font that is

  • Large enough to be easy on the eyes; 11-12 point. Use larger font sizes for section headers and smaller font sizes to hide minutiae.
  • Sans-serif (usually) for the content; Calibri, Helvetica, Arial, or Verdana
  • Serif fonts are more formal; Cambria, Times New Roman, Georgia, Garamond

Changing Fonts

Can we switch fonts? Discussion:

  • There are resume experts who believe you should never change the font of the resume. It’s too distracting.
  • Other experts believe that changing fonts between headers and promts to content helps guide the reader. For example, section headers in a sans-serif font, and content in a serif font, or vice-versa.
  • If you want to accent a name (school, employer, your name, etc.), I think that a serif font works nicely (this is entirely my opinion; some have vehemently disagreed with me).

Bold, Italic, CAPS, and Size

Recommendations:

  • Use boldface text to point out job titles or degrees–things your want to pop.
  • Use italicised text to hide the less important details, such as the location of a university or employer.
  • Use ALL CAPS very sparingly–maybe once in the whole resume–to mark section headings or perhaps your name.
  • Don’t change the font size unless someone threatens your life.

Rhetoric

Rhetoric: Persuasive language to convince someone to think or act differently.

We are convincing someone to change their mind from “I’ll throw out this resume” to “I should take a look at this resume”. Have multiple people look at your resume from a distance (I often write a resume, and then hold it 5-6 feet away from someone and ask them what they think.) You want your resume to send the clear message “HIRE ME” even before they read the first word.


Resume Content and Outline

Tip for Success: Your resume should rarely–if ever–be longer than two pages. As you gain education and experience, less important education and experience should be left off.

Overview

Industry

A technical resume for entry-level industry candidates should have the following sections:

  1. Overview and Personal Statement
  2. Education
  3. On-the-job Experience
  4. Awards
  5. Skills (not otherwise mentioned in the Work Experience section)

This order is not required, but usually recommended. Keep education before work experience until you have more contiguous, relevant, industry experience than you have graduate education–one to two years for someone with a master’s.

Academia

A technical resume for an associate scientist or junior faculty will have the following additional sections:

  1. Grants (as PI, Co-I, scientist in a role, sponsored student, etc)
  2. Publications (peer reviewed first, then in revision, then under review last)
  3. Teaching (highlight any classes where you were the instructor of record)
  4. Presentations (highlight invited talks or posters)
  5. Abstracts (especially if published)
  6. Department Service (edited papers or grants, consulting, school panels, etc)

These sections often slot somewhere between 2 and 4 of the industry outline.

Overview and Personal Statement

Tip for Success: Include a short personal statement. Facts can impress, but stories are memorable.

I once saw a factoid that HR people are twice as likely to call a candidate who’s resume has a personal statement than a candidate without one. Recall that you have six seconds to impress: use the personal statement to tell the story of you and why you are special. A personal statment is a taste of the rest of the dish; it’s often 3-5 bullet points or formatted sentences.

Here are some strategies to help you write a good personal statement:

  1. Put the personal statement first, but write it last. The personal statement should be the “highlight reel” of the rest of the resume. That means that you should write the rest of the resume first, and then pick the best parts to go into the professional summary.
  2. Tailor your personal statement to the job you have targeted. After you have written your resume, read the job posting in detail. Frame your best accomplishments using the nouns and verbs that are used in the job posting itself. You aren’t changing the whole resume for each job, just how the HR people will see it. Also, by using the same keywords as the job posting, you are more likely to have an automated search engine flag your resume for human inspection.
  3. Teaser \(\rightarrow\) Trailer \(\rightarrow\) Movie. Your personal statement is the teaser: it should convince the reviewer to read the rest of your resume. Your resume is the trailer: it should convince the reviewer to interview you. You are the movie: make sure you are good enough so that the person who interviews you tells other people about you.
  4. Use numbers/details make your story tangible. You are telling the hiring manager the story of how you make money, but make sure to include concrete details of how many, how much, and how often. Compare “Hercules cleaned the royal stables” to “Hercules cleaned the 1000-horse stables of King Augeas in one day”. Which sounds more impressive?

Here are a few examples:

Professional Summary

A professional summary is a quick highlight of your experience meeting your employers’ goals. Most employers care about one thing–making money. This means that you should frame your career highlight to answer the question “How will this candidate make me money?”

Resume Objective

What if you don’t have a lot of relevant work experience? In this case, tell the HR people what you will do do for them. Here’s an example:

Education

At the early stages of your career, this section should be the most important after the Professional Summary. If you don’t have many degrees to include, include lines highlighting the projects you worked on and your achievements. As you gain work experience, this section will grow less and less important.

Text Example:

BS, Mathematics
University of West Florida 2011

  • Honors Thesis: “On University Campus Parking Shortages”
  • Summa Cum Laude
  • Kugelman Honors Techne Scholar
  • President of \(\Pi\text{ME}\) Mathematics Honors Society

Early Career Example

At this point, you have only recently graduated, or have not yet graduated. You probably don’t have much experience at all. In these cases, highlight the key components of your education that you believe give you the most attractiveness to HR staff in your desired industry.

5+ Year Experience Example

Once you have put in 5-10 years of work, let your work speak for itself. Your education at this point is just to prove you belong in the room. You don’t need to elaborate at all.

Work Experience

At the early stages of your career, this section will often be rather sparse. Simply mention the jobs you have held and for which companies you worked. Once you have a year of work experience, add bullets under each title you have had to explain the results you achieved in that role. When writing these bullets, make sure they are short, powerful, and to-the-point.

Text Example:

Project Manager
Epic Systems Corporation, Verona, WI 2011-2012

  • Supervised 8-person software install team
  • Managed 1.3M (USD) install budget
  • Repeatedly awarded for client-relations excellence

Photo Example:

Awards

The awards you should include should help tell your story. If possible, put awards that you earned on the job or during school in their relevant sections. However, if you have additional awards that you have earned, that clearly exhibit a facet of your character you would like to highlight, then add a seperate section for awards near the bottom of the page. It’s nice that you won the “Miss Idaho Potato Beauty Pageant”, but it doesn’t help convince a future boss that you can finish reports on time.

For awards, include:

  • Title: “Employee of the Month”
  • Date: “February 2017”
  • Details:
    • Exclusivity: “out of 38 employees”
    • Scope: “store-wide”
    • Reason: “for boosting sales 3% above expectations”

The details are where you get to cement that you have already done the tasks people are going to hire you for. The awards don’t change, but you can certainly tailor the details of the description to the specific industry. In the above example, this decscription is sales-specific. If this person were applying to a management role, I’d say “for collaborating with sales associates to increase revenue”. The award stays the same, but the details of it change based on the story you are trying to tell.

Skills

At the early stages of your career, this section should be the most important after the Professional Summary and Education. As you gain work experience, you will add new skills to this section, but you will probably discard some of the less-valuable skills. Use the skills section to list all the technical proficiencies, languages, softwares, and important “soft skills” (like “multi-tasking”, “teamwork”, “creativity”, or some other flowery horsecrap) you can think of. Because you don’t have to descibe them, this section takes up very little space.

Beat the Robot

Often, this section will not need to change between applications, because it’s simply a list of things you can do. However, in the age of computers, many places will have a computer scan you resume first to ensure that you list the skills specified in the job description. Use a tool like JobScan to compare your resume against the job posting. When you find a “skill” requested in the job posting that you know how to do, add it to your skills section.

Convince the Human

Once we make it to the humans, however, it’s better that your education and work experience prove you have the skills you claim to have. Thus, if you want people to know that you can use Excel, put Excel in your skills section, but also add a line somewhere else in the resume where you state how you solved a problem with Excel. “I’m proficient with Excel” says one thing; “Managed client look-up tables and built mailing lists with Excel and Outlook” says something totally different.

Zety Skills Summary

Important Skills
Top-5 Soft Skills
Adding Skills: Steps to Success

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